The Role of Familiarity on Viewpoint Adaptation for Self-Face and Other-Face Images

An adaptation method was used to investigate whether self-face processing is dissociable from general face processing. We explored the viewpoint aftereffect with face images having different degrees of familiarity (never-before-seen faces, recently familiarized faces, personally familiar faces, and the participant's own face). A face viewpoint aftereffect occurs after prolonged viewing of a face viewed from one side, with the result that the perceived viewing direction of a subsequently presented face image shown near the frontal view is biased in a direction which is the opposite of the adapting orientation. We found that (1) the magnitude of the viewpoint aftereffect depends on the level of familiarity of the adapting and test faces, (2) a cross-identity transfer of the viewpoint aftereffect is found between all categories of faces, but not between an unfamiliar adaptor face and the self-face test, and (3) learning affects the processing of the self-face in greater measure than any other category of faces. These results highlight the importance of familiarity on the face aftereffects, but they also suggest the possibility of separate representations for the self-face, on the one side, and for highly familiar faces, on the other.